It's been about a week since hooking up the BD-95FD and I must say it is beautiful. As to be expected though, it is slow to load which has been consistent with the Pioneer models. Video/Sound quality is excellent as to be expected. Pioneer does a good job with build quality and this model is no exception.

The unit ships with a copy of Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds live at the Music Hall which is amazing. I have been running this unit through Pioneers new Elite PRO-150FD 60" Kuro Plasma panel. I am using an Elite VSX-94 receiver so I am able to reproduce True HD sound and picture.

The 95 produces 1080P @ 24fps with 3:3 pulldown. This is true HD folks and you can tell the difference. The player is a little on the high side with a price tag of $1k, but, you get what you pay for.

So we have had some time to play with the 64GB SSD drive by Samsung and the results are mixed. I am using it on a Dell XPS 1330 with 4GB of RAM and a 2.0 dual core. I have about 35GB of data on the drive. First impressions are good, the system boots much faster and programs are snappy. I am noticing a lot of disk activity in Outlook 2007 which is typical. Performance was not as great as I expected. I figured that I would realize huge gains under normal operation. This is not the case. In fact, I am skeptical as to whether I can recommend the drive.

It is absolutely silent, runs cool and has increased battery life by about 15 - 20%. Due to its structure it is vibration proof for the most part making it a great road warrior. SSD technology is the future in my opinion and Samsungs product line is just the tip of the iceberg. I expect many more products to come in this category. I am going to give it another week or so of hard use before I make my final conclusion.

Over the past few months there has been a lot of talk around dual-band routers. Over the past few weeks I have been using Linksys entry into this space, the WRT600N. As all Linksys products, it has a straight forward interface, easy setup and works well with most network devices and services. As an IT pro, it is important security is important to me, furthermore, control of my destiny is important as well. Linksys leaves a lot of room for fine tuning this device.

Dual-band routers allow you to setup networks in both the 2.4 and 5GHz range allowing for isolated networks. This is useful for say, streaming content on one and browsing on another. The main advantage is that it separates the traffic providing better quality of service for critical services.Aesthetically the device is attractive and the black color is a nice change for Linksys. The setup took about 15 minutes and I am running an "N" only network at 5GHz and a mixed network at 2.4GHz. The 5GHz network range seems to be very limited at the moment and I am having trouble isolating the issue. For the most part, however, I am please with the performance of the unit.As a side note Buffalo networks recently had to pull their Dual-Band product due to FCC issues.